Manufacturers audited by the agency couldn’t prove planes
were properly built and inspected, and weren’t able to notify
plane owners of safety directives, the FAA said. In some cases,
planes built in unapproved nations were shipped through third
countries to make it appear they were properly constructed,
according to the agency.

“They are just getting started,” Dan Johnson, president
of the Light Aircraft Manufacturers Association, said of the FAA
crackdown in a telephone interview. The Port Orange, Florida-
based group represents 60 firms in the industry, according to
its website.

While he didn’t dispute the FAA’s findings, Johnson said
there’s no indication that planes are unsafe. The association
sent a letter June 8 urging plane makers to keep adequate
records and comply with FAA regulations.

Light-sport planes must weigh no more than 1,320 pounds
(600 kilograms), can’t hold more than two people and can’t fly
faster than 138 miles per hour (222 kilometers per hour).
Manufacturers include Textron Inc. (TXT)’s Cessna subsidiary and
Tecnam North America, a division of Costruzioni Aeronautiche
Tecnam in Italy.

Streamlined Rules

The FAA created the light-sport category in 2004 in an
attempt to boost the flagging private-plane industry, Johnson
said. Through 2011, 2,235 of the planes have been registered in
the U.S., he said.

The FAA allowed the industry to develop its own consensus
standards for safety instead of imposing the manufacturing
requirements for traditional aircraft builders.

In an attempt to assess the new industry, the FAA visited
30 manufacturers selling the planes in the U.S. Inspectors found
many rule violations, according to a report the agency released
in 2010.

Most makers did not keep records on each plane and aircraft
owner to ensure quality, according to the report.

“We conclude that these lack of controls may result in the
production and distribution of such poorly documented aircraft
that it may be very difficult to verify conformity,” the agency
said in the report.

Foreign Manufacturers

The FAA also said it found irregularities in how U.S. firms
imported aircraft or plane parts. FAA regulations require that
aircraft manufactured outside the U.S. be assembled in countries
that have agreed to follow U.S. standards. U.S. firms must
ensure that parts are built to proper standards.

In some cases, all or most of the construction had been
done in other nations, even when U.S. firms told the FAA that
they were the manufacturer, according to the agency’s filing.
When that happened, the U.S. companies could not guarantee that
the planes were properly built.

The agency won’t license planes of light-sport
manufacturers that don’t follow the rules, effectively halting
their ability to sell them, according to the notice. Planes
previously licensed won’t be affected, it said.

The notice didn’t explain why the agency is acting now, two
years after its report.

Crash Rate

Light-sport aircraft appear to have a higher accident rate
than other private planes, according to Bruce Landsberg,
president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association
Foundation, which oversees the group’s Air Safety Institute. The
Frederick, Maryland-based association represents more than
400,000 pilots and aviation enthusiasts.

Because the category is so new, there isn’t enough data to
say how much higher the accident rate is or what may be causing
the difference, Landsberg said in a phone interview. There have
been an average of about seven private-plane crashes per 100,000
flight hours each year since 2000, according to U.S. National
Transportation Safety Board statistics.

As more planes enter the U.S. market, light-sport accidents
have increased, Landsberg said. There were 27 accidents in 2010,
seven of them fatal, about double the number in 2006, he said.

’Normal Oversight’

The FAA crackdown doesn’t threaten the industry, Johnson
said. He called it normal growing pains for a business that has
existed for less than a decade.

“This is reasonable and normal oversight by government,”
he said.

Most of the violations uncovered by the FAA involved a
failure to keep paperwork, he said.

“Missing a document doesn’t mean an airplane wasn’t built
right,” he said. “It just means you can’t prove it was built a
certain way.”

In its notice of the crackdown, the FAA gave the public 90
days to comment.